The past year under the Trump administration
seems to be more about protecting the revenue streams of the
medical industry than improving the lot of the patient. These pages
will explore selected issues.

Beginning November 22, 2016 this site is
getting its first major overhaul in 15 years. If you are
looking for something specific that you don't see please
send me an email request.

Welcome, this is Not a
.COM but rather a Web space for making and sharing tools
that help patients work with the doctors and nurses of their
choice. The focus here then, is building partnerships, not
marketing, and not simply providing information. The problem
is the fragmentation of the medical record among the many
"owners" of parts of the record who are not the subject of the
record. The goal is to have all the relevant data available
whenever and wherever patient meets doctor to make a health
decision. This goal is the same if that meeting is
face-to-face or over the Internet or by cell phone (hopefully
stopped at the side of the road.)

A New Year's resolution! Remember no
person or institution cares more about the accuracy of your and
your family's medical data than you. We started with
a family oriented immunization record 30 years ago at the
West Bloomfield, Henry Ford Health System, Pediatric Unit.
Next we will be exploring a family oriented and family owned
medical record. Not a family portal into some provider's
record system, but a family's medical record that providers
might use a portal to access. The U.S. military paper record
that was carried to the specialist by the patient was a very
good system. The digital age needs a system like this. Linus
Torvalds's innovative Git version control for the Linux kernel
is a nice template for a more modern medical record.

Open Source software is an important topic
here. The Open Source community has "discovered" many things
that medicine once knew and perhaps forgot.

The Open Source software movement and the
tradition of medicine have much in common. Individuality and
privacy are respected. The best practices and methods are
shared openly. Progress is rapid because both good and bad
ideas are identified quickly by a larger, interested, informed
community working together. Resources are not wasted hiding
secrets and defects to protect market share. Both traditions
are established. Medicine is the older, but still the
apprentice at using the Internet for community communications.

The business of proprietary software
development and the business of medicine also have something in
common. Arguably this has been good for some software
companies. Also secret methods and screens may have benefited
some medical businesses. In turn, this may have benefited some
medical consumers. Increasingly however, the medical consumer
in the marketplace is not the patient.

Consider two sorts of medical software. One,
software to manage care-givers and the care they render. Two,
software for a patient and physician to use together to plan
health-care. The first is common, often proprietary and
secret. It has a mixed legacy and poor prognosis. The second
is rarer and often co-opted as advertising. It is however,
more common in other arenas. For example, there are many
software tools to help a client and financial advisor plan for
retirement. This second, somewhat under-served, area is our
focus here.